Thank You, John by Michelle Gurule, Sister Creatures by Laura Venita Green, and Zone Rogue by Michael Jerome Plunkett will all be released this Fall, within a month of each other, from Unnamed Press. The indie press has selected three debuts to be their lead titles for the season instead of building their promotion around established writers. Here at Debutiful, we love that notion, and below we have a combined Q&A with the three debut writers to showcase their exciting and gorgeous debut covers designed by Jaya Nicely.
All three titles are now available for pre-order and more information about each writer and book can be found below.
Michelle Gurule‘s writing explores what it means to be a queer, mixed-ethnicity woman and has appeared in The Offing, Joyland, StoryQuarterly and elswhere. Her essay, “Exit Route,” won StoryQuarterly‘s Nonfiction Prize in 2021, which was judged by T Kira Madden. He debut memoir, Thank You, John (September 23) explores class, gender, and power as she guides readers through being a sugarbaby while trying to find her footing in the world.
While writing the book did I have any idea what I wanted the cover to look like?
While writing the book, I’d always envisioned a take-out bag with the words “THANK YOU, JOHN. THANK YOU, JOHN. THANK YOU, JOHN.” Stacked on top of one another in red. I’ve had vision boards of this imagined cover for years and I even made a cake with this design when I signed my book contract with Unnamed. But once it was time to start giving cover direction for my memoir, I felt really open to either the thank you bag idea or something totally surprising and new. It was exciting to have a visual way of collaborating with another artist via the book.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?
Once I began working with the publishing team, the cover design process was a lot of fun! I was asked to think about images I’d like on the cover or any images I wanted to stay away from and then I made a vision board to help give Unnamed’s cover designer Jaya Nicely direction. For years I’d envisioned the take-out bag with Thank You, Thank You, Thank You on it, and when I looked at Jaya’s Instagram I saw that she actually had drawings of Thank You bags and had some really cool artwork of junk food for a few different magazines. Needless to say, the book cover vision board was a lot of fun to make!
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
I was nervous and excited when I got the email from my editor Allison Woodnutt with the cover options. I was by myself, sitting in a coffee shop. The email had a note about Jaya’s process and how she saw the two options— one was the thank you bag, like I’d asked and the other was the milkshake, which is the one we went with.
It was really cool to have the example of the cover I’d always imagined and then to see Jaya’s own vision. I was immediately drawn to the milkshake. I loved the colors. I loved the image. I loved that she still used the take out thank you bag text font. I became attached very quickly!
How does the cover work to convey what the book is all about?
I love what Jaya did with the cover because it’s multilayered and has so many elements of the book’s themes. The colors are red and yellow and white which play into the lore of fast food (specifically McDonald’s) and it’s upbeat. It gives it such a warm, playful vibe, which reflects the tone of the book. The milkshake with two straws represents a shared pot of desire, that both the sugar daddy, John, and I, the sugar baby, are drinking from. We want different things— he wants companionship and intimacy, while I was desperate to get out of debt and get out of poverty—but we’re both in it together trying to get our fill.
Laura Venita Green has won the Story Foundation Prize, received a Pushcart Prize Special Mention, and appears in The Missouri Review, Story, Joyland, and Fatal Flaw. In addition to writing fiction, she works as a translator, where her work has been featured inWorld Literature Today and The Apple Valley Review. Her debut novel, Sister Creatures (October 7), is set in a decaying Louisiana town, where a college dropout’s strange encounter with a feral girl sets off a chain of events that intertwine the lives of women grappling with identity, connection, and a mysterious, shape-shifting force born of buried trauma. The art used for the cover is by Laura Makabresku.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
No, not at all. I worked on Sister Creatures for four years before I began thinking about the publishing process—getting an agent, getting a book deal, strategizing on publicity—and to me, cover design felt like an aspect of publishing rather than writing. Of course, now I’m hyper-aware of the ways in which a cover can make or break a book and of how much they’ve influenced me while I browsed my favorite bookstores. This is all very fun to consider now, but during the drafting process it would have felt like too much pressure focusing on a finished product.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?
While my book was out on submission, I spent a lot of time checking out publisher websites and looking at their book covers. I could immediately tell on a gut level if the book I wrote vibed with the books I was seeing. Unnamed Press was one of the publishers I felt most aligned with, and I recognized several of their books (with their badass covers) from my shelves. They have a fantastic art director on staff, Jaya Nicely, who handles all of the covers, which I think gives them a consistent level of quality.
In my author questionnaire, my publishing team invited me to give them my thoughts around covers but emphasized wanting to know the elements I particularly didn’t want. Here was my very brief response:
“I LOVE Unnamed’s covers!!! I’m also really bad at design, so I will trust the artist (though let me know if you prefer I get more involved in which case I can send examples of covers I love).”
Ha! As you can see, I chose to be uninvolved, which I think was fine by them. Of course that left me in a state of nervous anticipation, but I was going to feel that no matter what—that’s just the life of a debut author. I was in the JFK airport, on my way to the AWP conference, when I received a file with cover options. I texted with my husband, my agent, and a close writing friend and had them all open the file before me and assure me that it would be okay. Once I got the nerve to look myself, I saw that there were three options, all of them great in different ways, though the cover you’re seeing now was absolutely the front runner. After that it was pretty quick—a tweak or two on the artwork and settling on font treatment.
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
Joyful! I still have the hugest grin on my face. Which is so nice, because finding joy during the publishing process is more difficult than it should be. One thing I consistently hear from debut authors who have already been through a book launch is that they wish they’d been able to enjoy it all more in the moment. I get it—it’s so easy to get caught up in worrying about the future. How will my book do? Will people review it? Positively or negatively? Will they even read it?! And how will I manage to embarrass myself along the way? But in moments like this—getting a cover I love, one that already feels like my book—I get to step back and remember that this process is actually really fun.
I’m still a week or two away from having my ARCs in hand, and I think seeing the physical print (versus the digital copy) is when it’s going to hit the hardest. I’ll just say it: I might cry.
How does the cover work to convey what the book is all about?
I think the cover conveys the tone of my book so well—atmospheric and foreboding, gothic, eerie. There’s a character we meet in the first chapter of Sister Creatures, a strange evangelical girl whose family lives off-grid in a manner that inspires a lot of speculation and gossip in this small Louisiana town where the first third of my book takes place. She’s a character whose presence is often felt, though she is rarely seen. The girl on the cover similarly inspires a lot of speculation. She has this beautiful long hair and dress, but her feet are sort of dirty and why is she standing alone in this bare room? The bird she’s holding—is it a friend, or is it captive, frantic in its attempts to get away? The girl is turned away from us—is the expression on her face happy or sad? Calculating? Terrified? It asks us to participate, to use our imaginations, filling in the answers that it won’t provide. My favorite type of book to read is one that invites me in and lets me interpret, and it’s what I sincerely hope my book does for readers. Finally, the font treatment pulls it all together with its handwritten, scribbled-in nature (which is absolutely relevant to the book) and the way the gradient changes from light to dark. I couldn’t be happier with how it turned out!
Michael Jerome Plunkett is the co-founder and Executive Director of the Literature of War Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to enriching the minds of those in uniform by providing access to exceptional literature and fostering meaningful discussions around military experiences, and he hostsThe LitWar Podcast. Zone Rouge (September 2), his debut novel, follows a team of bomb disposal experts in the haunted fields of Verdun as a buried skeleton unearths long-hidden truths, igniting a reckoning with history, memory, and the enduring scars of war on both land and people.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
None at all. There were certain images that stuck with me–some that came to me as I was writing, others I discovered while doing research. I compiled the photographs I found into a drive and had several pinned to the wall above my desk. But I never considered these images to be part of the cover art. Not to be self-deprecating, but while I had a lot of confidence in this novel, I never knew for certain that it would be published so I wrote it with the type of unique freedom a person writing their first novel writes–I wrote the book I wanted to write without any regard for what it might look like on a shelf one day.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?
I read somewhere about how controlling J.D. Salinger was about his cover art. I think the letter “J” and the letter “D” are actually different fonts, if I remember correctly. That was the level of control he exercised over his covers. I think when I was younger, I would have viewed this as strong artistic conviction or vision. But now it feels restrictive and ultimately inhibitive. I’ve come to understand writing a novel, from start to finish, as a much more open, amorphous process. Novels, for me, take on the Big Ideas. As a writer, to render these big ideas poignantly in fiction, I need to be as open as possible to the world around me. I also need to be aware of the way I am orienting myself to the world–what moves me? What is influencing me right now? It is as much about what is coming in as it is about what I am putting out. In this way, I as the writer feel more like a conduit of a larger story. This approach extends to the creation of the physical book. I am not great with visual art, it is definitely not my strong suit. So I considered this process an opportunity for trust. I sent Jaya that file of photographs I had compiled and let it go! I remained as open minded as possible. A big step forward for me as a writer was to relinquish the obsessive control over the work. Listen to other people. I practiced this approach with the cover art as well. Which, honestly, wasn’t difficult at all because Jaya is so talented. She does not miss.
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
What an incredible moment. I’ve never worked with an artist to create a cover before this novel so it was an entirely new experience. When I received the email with the mock up, I dropped everything. I love a good ceremony. I stood up, got some coffee, took a beat to clear my mind, and then returned to my desk to open the email. I knew it was the cover the moment I saw it. We didn’t change a thing.
I am forever fascinated by the relationship of the:
Writer <–> The Book <–> The Reader
You have the writer on one end, the reader on the other, and the work is floating somewhere in between, constantly pulled back and forth through subsequent readers, interpretations, etc. Novels are never static objects. They are living, breathing artifacts. Readers experience the story in their own minds and imagination. It was so special to be able to see a visual representation of my own work.
How does the cover work to convey what the book is all about?
The cover is striking and intriguing, I believe it conveys the tone of the novel so well. This entire book is a reimagining of the Sisyphus myth (specifically, Albert Camus’ interpretation) and I feel like there’s just the right amount of subtle references. Ultimately, this is a book about war, about the everlasting effects of trauma, both individual and collective, and the inescapable, immovable weight of history. But creating art about war is like creating art about sex, it is so easy to slip into clichés and tropes that distract from authenticity and honesty. I think Jaya did such a fantastic job incorporating all of these elements without belaboring the point. The clueless cow as the focal point at the top of a bomb-laden mountain, above a wide, unmoving countryside landscape. It is perfect.